Overview: MouseHunt is a simple game that involves baiting mousetraps and seeing what mice get caught. It’s surprisingly addictive – the gameplay is very casual, only requiring you to check in often enough to restock your cheese, and there are a huge variety of mice of different rarities, special items, maps to new areas, and complicated craftable traps to create.

You start off with a simple choice between two traps – the glue trap, that attracts more mice and is slightly cheaper, and the high-tension spring trap, that’s more likely to dispatch the ones that go for the cheese. Either one works fine at this stage – however, later on, the proper choice of trap is absolutely key to catching the different kinds of mice.

For the most part, catching mice is passive. You pick your trap, pick your bait, travel to your desired location, and then wait. You can check in as often as every fifteen minutes to blow the Hunter’s Horn and check your trap, but as long as you don’t run out of bait, your traps will keep catching mice. And there are a lot of mice to catch – each new area has different mice with different tastes in cheese and more or less cleverness about the different kinds of traps, and catching them all is a real challenge. They range from simple brown, white, and grey mice, to Bionic Mice, Ninja Mice, and Zombie Mice, and that’s just in the starting area.

Catching mice nets you points as well as gold and possibly loot, and points translate into access to new traps and areas. Many areas can only be accessed after finding random-drop maps, keys, and other items, and at the higher levels, catching difficult mice with increasingly tricky traps made from loot dropped by other tricky mice. For a game that doesn’t actually require your input other than logging in once a day and occasionally restocking your cheese, it can get very complicated.

MouseHunt is a deceptively simple game with a huge amount of math-heavy tactical choices and complicated knowledge to absorb – it’s got a highly active wiki and a lively community. If you’re looking for something to play that requires more brain power than time, check it out!